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dies natalis

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Birthday; the day of birth, whether of a person, an institution, or a great event.

Detailed Definition
Dies natalis refers to a birthday and was used in Roman tradition both for human births and for the founding days of cities and institutions. In poetry, it appears in birthday odes, celebratory verse, and meditations on origins. The phrase carries a sense of annual renewal and of the significance of beginnings. In Christian tradition, dies natalis could also refer to the day of a martyr's death, their birthday into eternal life, adding a profound ambiguity to the concept of origination.
Example
Example in poetry:
The tradition of birthday odes from Horace through Jonson to Auden includes many dies natalis poems — celebrations of the birthday as an annual renewal and occasion for reflection; W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" was written on a historically catastrophic dies natalis of sorts — the birth of the Second World War — giving the poem its particular quality of public crisis meeting private voice; A student might write a dies natalis poem for themselves or someone they love — using the birthday as an occasion to measure the distance between the person who was born and the person who has become; Keats's odes have the quality of a dies natalis meditation — each great poem a kind of rebirth in which the poet comes into fuller possession of their gifts; A contemporary poet might write a dies natalis poem for a city, a country, or an institution — celebrating origins while honestly assessing what the birthday being celebrated has actually produced
Additional Notes
Dies natalis has an important dual meaning in Christian Latin: it refers both to the day of physical birth and, for martyrs and saints, to the day of their death, which is their birthday into eternal life. Students should note that this double meaning gives the phrase a complexity that enriches both its celebratory and its elegiac uses: in Christian poetry, the death of a saint can be described as a dies natalis without irony, since death is genuinely a birth into a fuller life. This usage appears in the Office of the Dead and in many martyrologies, and it shapes the tradition of Christian elegy from the early church through to Hopkins and beyond. The secular birthday poem (genethliacon) is a separate genre with classical roots in Pindar and Horace, and students should be aware of both traditions when they encounter dies natalis in poetry.
Also Known As
birthday birth day natal day natalis dies day of birth
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